The Competitiveness of Nations
in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
Harry Hillman Chartrand
April 2002
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Index [added by HHC] III [Rebellion and Conservatism] |
The Greatness of Gershom
Scholem
Commentary, Vol. 76, No. 3, September 1983,
pp.37-46
GERSHOM SCHOLEM,
who died two years ago, produced such a
far-reaching revolution in our understanding of Judaism that his work cannot yet
be assessed in its entirety. As the
foremost Jewish scholar of our age, the author of numerous pathbreaking books
and essays (among the best-known in English being Major Trends in Jewish
Mysticism, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical
Messiah, The Messianic Idea in Judaism, and On Jews and Judaism in
Crisis), he radically revised, and gave fresh life to, the entire field of
Jewish studies. At the same time,
the new insights which he brought to his reading of Jewish experience and
ideology required, and have resulted in, a reorientation of all thoughtful Jews
to their own tradition and to the implications of their religious history. A brilliantly panoptic mind, a true
“master thinker,” Scholem represented a force in the intellectual life of our
century, and not only in Jewish intellectual life, whose influence will be felt
for a long time to come.
BORN in 1897
into an assimilated German-Jewish family in Berlin, Scholem as a youngster
showed talent in mathematics and philosophy and seemed destined for a
conventional university career. He
rebelled, however, against the bourgeois ambitions of his parents; similarly, he
refused to adopt the Germanic values which inspired so many of his
contemporaries. His brother, also a
rebel, became a Communist, but the young Gerhard (as he was then called) became
a Zionist, and planned to emigrate to Palestine. His Zionism changed the direction of his
studies: he determined to master the cultural past of the Jewish people, and
addressed himself with sober single-mindedness to the acquisition of Hebrew and
Aramaic and to the study of the classical literature of the Bible and Talmud.
He soon became fascinated by Jewish
mysticism, a subject generally regarded in German-Jewish academic circles with
contempt, as so much unintelligible and primitive gibberish, unworthy of
scholarly investigation. In later
life, Scholem often told the story of how as a young man he visited Philip
Bloch, the only Jewish scholar in Germany who had a collection of kabbalistic
books and manuscripts. After
admiring the manuscripts, Scholem (then in his early twenties) said, “How nice,
Herr Professor, that you’ve studied all this!” The venerable Bloch replied, “What! Am I supposed to read this
rubbish, too?”
Scholem himself soon began collecting kabbalistic books,
acquiring some very rare ones at dirt-cheap prices. But unlike Bloch, he read them all, and
soon made himself into an expert on the subject of Jewish mysticism. He switched his university studies to
Oriental languages, and eventually produced, as his doctoral thesis and his
first scholarly effort, Das Buch Bahir (Berlin, 1928), a translation,
with notes, of the mysterious book Bahir, the earliest extant kabbalistic
work. Here began Scholem’s massive
reconsideration of the whole of Jewish mystical literature, by which he
eventually set it in historical order, overturning in the process the ideas both
of Orthodox Jews and of the progressive scholars of Judaism loosely grouped in
the academic movement known as Wissenschaft des Judentums (the “science
of Judaism”).
Shortly after getting his doctorate, Scholem moved
permanently to Palestine, against the wishes of his parents. Chance threw in his way the post of
librarian of the newly founded Hebrew University. Four years later, in 1927, a vacancy
occurred for a lecturer in Jewish mysticism, and when the university authorities
applied to Germany for a recommendation, they were told that the best man for
the job was under their noses - their librarian, Gershom Scholem. Thus Scholem’ entered upon his academic
career. His father, who had wanted
him to be a professor in a German university, could hardly have imagined the
renown that his son would achieve as professor of Jewish mysticism and kabbalah
at the Hebrew University. Having
scorned the ladder of German academic success, and disbelieving entirely in the
concept of “German-Jewish symbiosis” which had meant so much to the philosopher
Hermann Cohen and others, Scholem was amply justified in his choice by the
subsequent course of events.
* HYAM MACOOBY is librarian and lecturer at the Leo
Baeck College in London. He is the
author of Revolution in Judea: Jesus and the Jewish Resistance, Judaism on
Trial, and, most recently, The Sacred Executioner (Thames &
Hudson).
37
Indeed, there is a link between Scholem’s revolt against
the concept of “German-Jewish symbiosis” and his decision to embark on the study
of Jewish mysticism. For this was a
field of study which was as remote as possible from German academic ideas of the
respectable. When he turned to this
wild, strange subject, Scholem was making a claim to Jewish, as opposed to
German, culture. In this respect,
he was not alone; he was following the path of Martin Buber, who had asserted
the contemporary relevance of one product of the mystical tradition, Hasidism,
in the face of German-Jewish disdain for this uncouth movement of East European
Jewry. He was also following the
path of Micha Joseph Bin-Gorion (Berdyczewski), who founded the study of Jewish
folklore. And in a way Scholem was
tracing the same arc of development as the religious philosopher Franz
Rosenzweig, who on the point of conversion to Christianity was recalled to
Judaism not by the decorous German-Jewish Orthodoxy of Samson Raphael Hirsch but
by attending a fervent Yom Kippur service in a prayer room of East European
Jews, where, for the first time, he understood what Judaism was
about.
Yet none of these men, Scholem included, quite severed
himself from his German background. Even in their rebellion against German
culture, they were influenced by German models. Buber, Bin-Gorion, and even Rosenzweig
were doing for Judaism what Hamann and Herder had done for Germany - asserting a
romantic attachment to folkish roots as opposed to the ideals of rationalist
universalism. As for Scholem, in
joining the Zionist youth movement, he was asserting his Jewish identity in a
way partly parallel to that of the German youth movements of the time. In fact, despite his anti-Germanism,
Scholem never lost his unmistakably Germanic stamp. He brought to the study of the Kabbalah,
that most un-Germanic subject, standards, and modes of scholarship that he
learned in Germany. He promoted
these standards over and against Buber’s subjective, romantic style of thought
(which was itself integrally German). Thus the “German-Jewish symbiosis” which
Scholem attacked so bitterly as a snare and as a delusion was in some ways, as
his own work testifies, also a weapon and a support. But this, of course, only serves to make
the tragic fate of German Jewry all the more poignant a
spectacle.
THE study of Jewish mysticism would have offered a
tremendous challenge to any ambitious scholar, but it took a Scholem to realize
the true possibilities. For he
sensed from the start that these materials were not just a heap of rubble,
requiring a job of scholarly tidying-up. He saw that they constituted an
intellectual system of great power which had played a highly important role in
the history of Judaism and had indeed contributed to its continuing vitality.
The system was not of the rational
or philosophical type, but was the product of the mythological imagination,
which Scholem regarded as an essential element in religion and in community life
alike. Not that he succumbed to the
temptation of regarding Jewish mysticism as the only “true” or authentic
Judaism. Rather, he adopted a model
of balance, or dialectical tension, in which mysticism formed one of the
opposing poles, with rationalism forming the other. (Here Scholem differed from both Buber
and Bin-Gorion, who were content to be dislocated from the central movement or
balance of Judaism and to identify themselves with dissident or peripheral
trends, thus developing a “counterhistory” of Judaism.)
But the first task, to which Scholem addressed himself
with Germanic thoroughness, was simply to collect the scattered materials of
Jewish mysticism, many of which had never been published in printed form. Scholem’s early bibliographical works
listed the various manuscripts and books and thus made an ordered study and
assessment possible. The next task
was to bring some method to the dating of these materials and thus to gain an
idea of the history and development of mystical theories and notions. This required, above all, accurate
philology, i.e., mastery of the language of the documents. Scholem’s philological expertise,
acquired through unbelievably hard work on the part of one not brought up in
Hebrew or Aramaic studies, enabled him to provide convincing solutions to the
main puzzles of the documents, and to dispose of the amateurish hypotheses about
dating that had hitherto reigned in the field. Thus Scholem was able to work out how
Jewish mysticism changed over the course of time. This had never been previously
understood. Before Scholem’s
investigations, Jewish mysticism had been regarded as a seamless whole, both by
its devotees and by its opponents - its devotees considering it too holy to be
divided into historical periods, its opponents considering it undifferentiated
nonsense.
The materials of Jewish mysticism, as Scholem
demonstrated, belong in the main to two different periods. In the earlier period, mystical thought
centered on the Merkavah (“Throne” or “Chariot”) of God. This Merkavah mysticism was to be found
in the so-called Hekhalot tracts, deriving from Palestine, which describe
how mystics (identified as talmudic figures like Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Ishmael)
journeyed through the seven heavens, surviving dangers from fearsome angels, to
reach the Throne of God where they achieved a vision of the Deity. Such astral journeys, it appears, took
place in a trance, induced by fasting and prayers.
The later mysticism is that which is called “Kabbalah,”
and it underwent its classical development in Spain in the 13th century. This kind of mysticism is much more
elaborate than the earlier Merkavah mysticism. It contains a complicated system of
theosophy by which the nature of God.
38
and His mode of creation are explained through the
concept of the ten Sefirot, or emanations, mediating between God and the
world. Rather than
trance-experience, Kabbalah comprises a kind of mystical philosophy, demanding
study and contemplation. The chief
literary work of Kabbalah is the Zohar, and on it is based the subsequent
history of Jewish mysticism. The
Zohar inspired new developments, notably the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria
(16th-century Palestine), the messianic movement of Sabbatianism (17th century),
and the hasidic movement beginning in the 18th century. Indeed, so enormous was the impact of the
Zohar that it was in time accepted by Jews as a divinely inspired work,
equal (at least) in status to the Mishnah and Midrash, and surpassed only by the
Bible, to which it gave the esoteric key.
Scholem’s work on the documents of early Jewish
mysticism, or Merkavah mysticism, led eventually to his dating their basic
content much earlier than had previously been thought. The beginnings of Jewish mysticism were
moved back from the early Middle Ages to the first centuries of the Christian
era, thereby confirming the sparse indications in the Talmud of mystical
activity within rabbinic circles. This did not mean, however, a
reinstatement of the traditional Orthodox view that Jewish mysticism derives
from primeval, even antediluvian, times. Unlike the kabbalists themselves, Scholem
did not regard the biblical prophets, for example, as mystics. In his view, mysticism was a phenomenon
that succeeded the dying away of biblical prophecy, and represented an attempt
to bridge the resultant gap between man and God.
SCHOLEM’S work on the later Jewish mysticism, or
Kabbalah, and its main literary expression, the Zohar, resulted not in a
confirmation of early origins but, on the contrary, in a demonstration of its
medieval character.
Written in Aramaic, once a Jewish vernacular but in the
Middle Ages far less well-known than Hebrew and therefore more impressive, the
Zohar claims as its author a famous sage of the mishnaic period, Rabbi
Simeon ben Yohai. He in turn is
represented as having learned his secret wisdom from previous sages stretching
in an unbroken chain back to Adam; hence this mystical knowledge is given the
name “Kabbalah,” meaning “tradition.” Scholem offered a comprehensive and
convincing proof that almost in its entirety the Zohar was written by a
13th-century author, Moses de Leon, and as an original composition rather than a
compilation of previously existing materials. The full proof is one of the most
brilliant arguments in the history of literary criticism; it is lucidly
summarized in the fifth lecture in Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism
(1941).
To be sure, there had always been those, ranging from
the ultra-Orthodox Jacob Emden to the Enlightenment historian Heinrich Graetz,
who had denounced the Zohar as a forgery (and Graetz had argued that the
forger was Moses de Leon). Yet
against this, there was the sheer heterogeneity of the Zohar, which is
more like a whole literature than a single book, comprising not only a
commentary on the Torah, but a number of separate treatises, written in
apparently different styles, with titles such as “The Book of Concealment” and
“The Secret of Secrets.” Many
scholars had come to the conclusion that the Zohar was partly medieval,
but that it also contained a nucleus of genuinely ancient material. This plausible hypothesis was the one
with which Scholem began his investigations, for it seemed inherently unlikely
that one person could have produced such a massive literature on his own. Nevertheless, he finally concluded that
this was indeed the case, apart from three components which he declared to be
even later than the main body of the Zohar, being a rather weak imitation
of it by another hand.
What then are we to think of the Zohar, if
it is proved to be a medieval work masquerading as an ancient one? Scholem’s reaction was quite different
from that of the indignant Graetz. He pointed out that what is called
“pseudepigraphic” literature has played a great part in the history of
religions; many books of the Bible and Apocrypha belong to this category. The device of putting one’s ideas into
the mouth of some great figure of the past is not just a deceitful way of
attracting attention, but a method of self-annihilation by which the writer
opens himself to thoughts beyond his normal capabilities.
Having solved the question of the authorship and date of
the Zohar, and having detached this question from the issue of moral
blame (for forgery) with which it had been entangled, Scholem was able to look
at the Zohar as the classical expression of Spanish-Jewish mysticism in
its period. Yet far from relegating
the Kabbalah to one particular historical age, as its denigrators wished to do,
he showed that it was a stage in a continually developing movement of thought,
one with both a past and a future.
It was, finally, Jewish mysticism in its full
historical development that engaged Scholem’s synthesizing intellect. He wished to ascertain the factors that
unified the isolated Merkavah mystics of the early talmudic period with the
Zohar, with the complicated theosophic scheme of Lurianic Kabbalah, with
the trauma of Sabbatian messianism, and with the charismatic communal leaders of
the hasidic movement of the 18th century. In doing so he aimed to show how Jewish
mysticism changed from an esoteric by-path on the fringes of the Jewish
community to an active communal force capable of influencing the course of
Jewish history. This very large
project necessitated a scholarly stance very different from the usual
specialization in one historical period; it required, in fact, an
investigation ranging over eighteen centuries.
39
III [Rebellion and
Conservatism]
SCHOLEM saw in all forms of Jewish mysticism a
paradox of rebellion and conservatism. On the one hand, mystics are rebels
against the staidness of normative Judaism, with its orderly this-world
orientation and its concept of a transcendent God; against this, the mystic
tries to create bridges between the lower and the upper worlds. On the other hand, Jewish mystics have
been concerned not to abandon Judaism but to revitalize it: to put new meaning
into traditional prescriptions, prayers, and practices, and thus to defend them
against the encroachments of skepticism. Scholem sees this double aim as setting
up a tension that has both threatened the disintegration of Judaism and, at the
same time, has enabled Judaism to surmount the dangers of petrification. Only by walking this tightrope has
Judaism retained sufficient adventurousness to avoid fossilization. Only by risking disaster has it avoided
the greater disaster of grinding to a halt.
Scholem was hardly blind to the dangers of mysticism, or
unsympathetic to the arguments against it made at various times by Jewish
religious authorities. Although the
rabbis of the Talmud did not outlaw mysticism - on the contrary, they greatly
respected it - they nevertheless limited it as an activity to a carefully
circumscribed elite. And they
constantly warned against its perils: the mystic, aiming to ascend, to regions
far above the humdrum, mundane world, could end with a contempt for ordinary
everyday living that amounted to heresy. A famous cautionary story in the Talmud
tells of four rabbis who entered the “garden” (pardes) of mystical
experience; only one of them, Rabbi Akiva, emerged
unharmed.
Mysticism in the talmudic period was involved, in a way
not yet fully understood, with the doctrine known as Gnosticism, and adherence
to this doctrine, the rabbis understood, could lead to complete alienation from
Judaism. For there was a tendency
to explain the split between the mundane and the spiritual by postulating a
split in the universe itself; at its most extreme, this led to a doctrine of Two
Powers, the lower of which was the creator of this unsatisfactory earth, while
the higher power could be approached only by purging oneself of the dross of the
corporeal.
This dualism was Gnosticism proper. Jewish mystics, believing in One God who
created the earth, did their utmost to avoid it. Yet their very undertaking made
Gnosticism an ever-present danger. Scholem, indeed, was inclined to see the
origin of Gnosticism itself in an internal revolt against the “anti-mythological
stance” of the Jewish religion, an attempt to put back into the concept of God
the color, movement, and narrative interest that had been drained from it by the
shift from polytheism to monotheism.
It is certainly true that the Bible has nothing to say
about the biography of God or the geography of His dwelling place, while
Merkavah literature, with its elaborate angelology and its descriptions of the
seven heavens leading to the Throne room of God, does something to supply the
need for mythological content. In
the subsequent development of Jewish mysticism, the mythologizing urge was given
ever more imaginative play, and, as an inevitable consequence, the tendency to
dualism increased. In the Kabbalah,
God’s biography and geography receive fantastic elaboration. God is even provided with a wife, and,
eventually, with a cosmic love story, spanning the centuries of past and future,
with tragic episodes and a happy ending. The early mystics had voyaged through
space to reach the Throne of God; the later mystics voyage through God Himself
(they call this the “upper Merkavah”).
Geography and biography merge: the seven heavens become transformed into
seven regions of God Himself, with further regions to explore
beyond.
A STRONG impetus to the Kabbalah, Scholem argued, was
given by the coldness of the categories of Jewish medieval philosophy, in which
the anthropomorphisms of the Bible and Talmud were allegorized and rationalized
into philosophical abstractions taken from the Aristotelian system. Maimonides’ doctrine of the attributes of
God can still be discerned under the kabbalistic system of the Sefirot,
but changed and personalized as if in a dream. The attributes awaken to life and form
themselves into strange patterns and relations, some of them sexual. They combine into organic forms -
sometimes that of a man, sometimes that of a tree. Instead of philosophizing the
anthropomorphisms of Bible, Talmud, and Midrash into abstract categories, the
Kabbalah makes them even more concrete, but on a cosmic scale. If the Bible speaks of the “hand” of God,
this to the kabbalists is not just a metaphor for His influence on events, but a
real hand, so real that all human hands are unreal in comparison, since they
achieve what reality they have only by partaking of the reality of God’s hand.
The Kabbalah thus rebels against
the gulf between the spiritual and the material - a gulf created by the very
effort of philosophy to generalize and conceptualize.
Rationalism separates, while mysticism denies separation
and seeks to demonstrate that the universe forms a continuum. Thus the Kabbalah opposes not only the
rationalism of philosophy, but also that of the Talmud, which separates man from
God by regarding the commandments of the Torah as applying to the human
situation only, and not as a means of affecting the inner essence of God. The commandments in their talmudic
elaboration tend to assume the aspect of a mere set of rules, many of them
arbitrary, for the patterning of individual and communal behavior. The mystic rebels against this limited
role, and reasserts the link between the visible and
invisible
40
worlds: the commandments become prescriptions for
affecting the life of God and for promoting reconciliations among the various
parts of the cosmos. The Kabbalah
asserts always that what we experience on earth is what God experiences on high.
Our suffering is an adumbration of
the cosmic suffering of God. The
whole cosmos is yearning to achieve healing and wholeness, and the commandments
performed on earth by men have a vital role in bringing about this longed-for
denouement.
Yet if all this gives a new urgency and importance to
the performance of the commandments, it also sets the stage for their abolition,
when they have completed their cosmic task. The very idealization by which the
Kabbalah elevates the commandments to mystical or magical status sows the seeds
of antinomianism, or the abrogation of Law.
It is in just this way that the Kabbalah had an
extraordinary and revolutionary impact on Jewish ideas of the messianic age.
The early mysticism of talmudic
times, the Merkavah mysticism, had no messianic significance at all, because it
was confined to a very small circle of initiates who were interested in
obtaining a personal vision of God on His Throne. When, however, after many centuries,
Jewish mysticism surfaced again, first in Germany and then in Spain from the
11th century onward, it had acquired characteristics which were eventually bound
to produce an overt messianism of fateful import for future Jewish
history.
SPANISH Kabbalah contained a theory of history: an account of
how the world had been created, what had gone wrong with it, and how it might be
put right. In effect, it was a huge
magical system by which the initiate might expect to produce effects on a cosmic
scale, including the overcoming of the evil powers retarding the coming of the
messiah. This new system placed
enormous potential power in the hands of the mystic. The magical use of the commandments and
prayers at the hands of some great soul (confident or deluded enough to believe
that lie knew exactly how to turn the key) might cause reconciliations and
recombinations in the worlds above that would result in a tikkun, or
“mending,” and this beneficent readjustment of the cosmos would have, as its
inevitable corollary on earth, the coming of the messianic age. The mystic did not have to wait patiently
for the coming of the messiah, as the rabbis had enjoined; he could do something
to make it happen.
These practical potentialities would only be realized on
the political stage, however, when the Kabbalah had developed sufficient
prestige to foster a mass movement. In the Spanish Kabbalah, this was far
from being the case, and mystics were still small in numbers and uninfluential.
But the expulsion from Spain in
1492 gave a tremendous shock to the whole Jewish people, and it was in the wake
of that shattering event that a new great surge in kabbalistic thought and
activity took place, this time in Palestine in the 16th century in the town of
Safed. It centered on the
extraordinary personality of Isaac Luria, known as the Ari. Here the kabbalistic belief in the
correspondence of the human and the divine led to the daring doctrine that the
disaster of exile and expulsion was not just part of Jewish history but part of
the biography of God. In order to
create the world, God had had to exile part of Himself from Himself; and this
creative withdrawal (tzimtzum) or exile was what was being reenacted on
earth by Israel. This gave a
positive function to the exile that both comforted and stimulated hope; and new
attention was given to the stages of tikkun. The personality of Luria, together
with the charisma of his gifted circle of followers, leading a holy life in
Palestine, captured the interest and devotion of almost the whole Jewish
world.
Kabbalistic ideas, for the first time, now became the
norm in Jewish rabbinical teaching everywhere, and prayer books were altered to
conform with Lurianic notions of the mystical efficacy of prayer and the role of
the commandments in uniting the split in the upper worlds and reconciling God
with His exiled consort, the Shekhinah. Mysticism, from being a solitary
activity reserved for the very few in talmudic times, regarded as too dangerous
for general knowledge, had become part of the education of every learned
Jew.
At the same time, dualistic tendencies already apparent
in the Zohar received new emphasis in the Lurianic Kabbalah (which was
put into writing by Luria’s disciples, Luria himself being mostly, like
Socrates, a fount of oral, not written, wisdom). The evil against which the mystic pitted
himself was not psychological, as in talmudic Judaism, but cosmic, forming
(though this was unspoken) a part of the constitution of God Himself. The whole of cosmic history became the
story of God purging Himself of evil.
A fascination with the demonic, absent from the
classical Judaism of the Bible and Talmud, thus became increasingly a feature of
kabbalistic thinking and practice. Judaism now developed a doctrine of
Original Sin which stemmed from a period even earlier than the sin of Adam -
from the time of the cosmic disaster known as “the breaking of the vessels,” a
concept invented by Luria.
Our knowledge of this historical development of Jewish
mysticism is due, in major part, to the work of Scholem. This work, as I have mentioned, offended
many people - the Orthodox because of his late dating of the Zohar, and
the heirs of the Enlightenment because of his demonstration of the importance of
the role of mysticism in Judaism. Scholem’s next step, however, was even
more unpalatable. He resuscitated
the unsavory incident of
41
the pseudo-messiah Sabbatai Sevi, which most people
thought best forgotten, and showed that it was of central importance in Jewish
history, arising logically and inevitably out of the
Kabbalah.
SABBATAL
SEVI (1626-76) was a strange and tortured personality who came
from a milieu saturated with the concepts of the Lurianic Kabbalah. He alternated between moods of deep
depression and moods of manic exaltation, when he thought himself the messiah
and exuded a self-confidence that carried all before it. In his moods of exaltation he would
commit in public “strange acts” involving the breach of important Jewish laws
(for example, he would eat forbidden fat). To these acts, shocking to his audience,
he attached a mystical significance; but in his ordinary moods he adhered
strictly to all rabbinical and biblical laws.
On his own, Sabbatai Sevi would not have gained
widespread adherence. He was
dismissed by most people as unbalanced, and he himself believed in his messianic
mission only by fits and starts - and even when he believed in it, he was more
concerned to provide impressive charismatic exhibitions than to build a movement
or engage in the necessities of propaganda. It was only when Nathan of Gaza, a man of
great gifts and industry who was widely respected as a scholar and kabbalist,
became converted to a belief in Sabbatai that a messianic movement of historical
importance became possible. It was
Nathan who provided the link with the Lurianic Kabbalah and with the whole
previous history of Jewish mysticism, and who brought all the energy of this
centuries-old aspect of Jewish religious experience to the exploitation of the
compelling contradictions of Sabbatai’s character. At the same time, Nathan, accepted as the
prophet who by tradition would accompany the messiah, was able to mobilize
non-kabbalistic messianic expectations as well. By the time the movement acquired mass
support, it had become a mixture of talmudic, folkloristic, and kabbalistic
elements capable of appealing to a wide spectrum of the Jewish
people.
Gershom Scholem’s great work, Sabbatai Sevi:The
Mystical Messiah (Hebrew, 1957; English translation, 1973) is the apex of
his achievement, combining as it does detailed, patient scholarship with his
characteristic originality, cutting through the confusions of all previous
writers on the subject and leading to new formulations of wide significance for
the history of religion. The work
is, however, disconcerting in many ways. The Sabbatian movement ended in utter
bathos. The messiah-figure who had
aroused such hopes throughout the Jewish world, when given the choice of death
or conversion to Islam, accepted conversion. This ignoble collapse, for the vast
majority of Jews, meant the end of the movement, and it then became of
great concern to conceal the extent to which Sabbatai had received both official
and mass support. Part of Scholem’s
work consisted in exposing the extent of this cover-up, and here he aroused the
anger of other scholars who felt he had gone too
far.
Even more controversial was Scholem’s assessment of the
antinomian aspect of the Sabbatian movement. He showed how the Sabbatian movement had
put forward doctrines usually regarded as the antithesis of Judaism, and yet
these doctrines were not repudiated by the learned and pious scholars who
flocked to Sabbatal’s banner. For
example, Sabbatai claimed divine status by signing his letters “Shaddai,” one of
the biblical names of God. (He also
made great play of the fact that the name Sabbatai Sevi and “Shaddai” were
equivalent in the system of numerology known as gematria.) One would have thought that, as far
as pious Jews were concerned, this would have spelled an end to his claims; and
indeed some Jewish leaders were horrified by this blasphemy and withdrew their
support. But what is surprising is
how ‘many Jewish leaders took this claim to divinity in their
stride.
One could argue that the development of the Kabbalah,
especially in its Lurianic form, had prepared the way for this by according the
messiah a cosmic status that he did not have in talmudic Judaism, and also by
dividing the Godhead into so many layers or departments that it was possible to
identify the messiah with one of these aspects without deifying him completely.
Nevertheless, the fact is that the,
very thing that had been held to make Christianity idolatrous was now accepted
without protest by a large portion of the Jewish people amid their leaders.
On the basis of this, Gershom
Scholern came to the startling conclusion that there is no fixed
definition of Judaism; Judaism is simply everything that it has been
historically, and must therefore include a doctrine of the deification of the
messiah, at least as one of its possible manifestations.
The Sabbatian movement proved similar to Christianity in
another important respect: its abrogation of the Torah and declaration of the
advent of a new law. This aspect
was not fully developed in the lifetime of Sabbatai Sevi himself; yet he did
introduce many innovations of a liturgical character, incorporated new
festivals, and by his own performance of “strange acts” signalized that there
could be mystical power in the breaking of the law as well as in its observance.
This clear tendency to
antinomianism was, however, again accepted by the majority as within their
understanding of the character and function of a messiah.
After the apostasy and death of Sabbatai Sevi, these
antinomian tendencies were intensified by those who remained faithful to his
memory. The whole Torah was
regarded as abrogated, or at most as in force only until the expected return of
the messiah. Many Sabbatians
regarded Sabbatai’s
42
apostasy as itself an act of mystical significance, the
last of his “strange acts,” and decided to follow his example. They formed the Donmeh sect, continuing
to believe in Sabbatai secretly while outwardly behaving as Muslims - a weird
regression to the condition of the Marranos under Christianity. Finally, the Sabbatian sect known as the
Frankists turned antinomianism into a regime of sexual license and deliberate
ceremonial breaches of Jewish law. Their “sanctification” of sin, together
with their gnostic theology, made them them the spiritual heirs of such gnostic
libertine sects of the ancient world as the Carpocratians.
SCHOLEM wrote with a certain sympathy even about the
wildest excesses of Sabbatian antinomianism, with its doctrine of salvation
through sin. For he saw this
development as a logical and understandable outcome of the anarchic forces
within the Kabbalah - forces which were invoked for the defense of Judaism
against rationalism but which contained their own destructiveness. Moreover, he characteristically
considered Sabbatianism a creative as well as a destructive force. By breaking the mold of the Law, it
released new energies and new religious and political possibilities. Scholem pointed out the part taken by
Sabbatians, or ex-Sabbatians, in the French Revolution; and also what he claimed
was a strong Sabbatian influence in the growth of the Reform movement in Judaism
- a movement usually regarded as rationalist in the extreme, far removed from
mystical fantasies. According to
Scholem, the genesis of new ways of thought is more catastrophic and agonized
than later beneficiaries suppose; the Enlightenment itself owed more to
kabbalistic and neoplatonic occultism than to sober common sense. When one looks at the maelstrom of ideas
underlying the discoveries of Kepler and Newton, one is forced to
agree.
Indeed, the rise of modern science, as Alexander Altmann
and others have pointed out, owes much to the Kabbalah. Normative Judaism, preoccupied with
morality and the duties of family and community life, kept its gaze on this
world and dismissed cosmological speculation with the talmudic injunction
against asking “what is above, what is beneath, what was before, and what will
be hereafter.” The Kabbalah,
turning its gaze from earth to heaven, produced a daring cosmological scheme of
soaring range, precursor of the vast schemes of modern astronomy and atomic
physics. Even more important, the
Kabbalah was concerned with hidden forces in the universe, and with the
possibility of harnessing and manipulating them; this has been the key concept
of modern science and the secret of its power. So it was paradoxically the irrationalism
of mysticism, rather than the rationalism of Talmudism, that turned out to have
more in common with the ultra-rationalism of science.
Scholem’s work on the paradoxically creative power of
antinomianism aroused opposition from many quarters. He was accused of glorifying
antinomianism, and also of exaggerating its part in the fundamental thought of
the Kabbalah. Here there was
considerable misunderstanding. Scholem called himself a “religious
anarchist,” but he did not mean by this that he sided with the antinomians.
He meant that he did not believe
that there was a norm or orthodoxy in Judaism in comparison with which all other
trends were to be condemned as heresies or as inauthentic. Any trend that made use of Jewish
concepts and that did not seek to turn people away from Judaism (as, for
example, Christianity did) was part of the whirlpool that formed the historical
reality of Judaism, showing its vitality by the ceaseless opposition, conflict,
and ebb and flow of ideas. The
later forms of Sabbatianism, by their utter rejection of Orthodoxy, made the
same error of one-sidedness as did the rigid Orthodox who sought to repudiate
the vivifying concepts of Jewish mysticism. The health of Judaism lay in the
interplay of opposites, and thus in the acceptance of the whole of Jewish
tradition, not just part of it.
THE later history of the Kabbalah was seen by Scholem as
an attempt to recover from the destructiveness unleashed by Sabbatianism. The hasidic movement of the 18th century
retained the Lurianic and Sabbatian concept of a kabbalism-for-the-masses rather
than for a circle of mystical initiates, but the dangerous, antinomian genies
released by this concept were put back into the bottle. The Law was reasserted, and new effort
was put into the “joy ‘of the commandment.” To this end, Scholem argued, it was
essential to play down, or “neutralize,” the messianic aspect of Kabbalism.
In Hasidism, the messianic fervor
and sense of renewal that Sabbatianism had created were internalized, and
divorced from overt political action. The tzaddik, or commnunal leader,
became a kind of interim messiah, presiding over his Hasidim in a timeless
little enclave in which it was “always Sabbath.” The feeling of near-worship of Sabbatai
Sevi was transferred to the tzaddik in his particular circle, but without
the universal reference that could lead to actual deification. Hasidism, therefore, was a kind of
watered-down Sabbatianism, owing its tone to the previous, now-discredited
movement.
This was a characterization that gave great offense to
present-day Hasidim, who hotly denied any historical or theoretical link with
Sabbatianism. And Scholem also
“offended” against the conception of Hasidism made popular by Martin Buber as a
mysticism that glorified everyday life. Scholemn sharply criticized this as an
idealization which ignored the gnostic influence filtered through the Lurianic
and Sabbatian movements. Hasidism,
he wrote, did not actually glorify everyday life but
43
considered it to be sunk in the power of evil (the
“husks” or kelipot, left over from the “breaking of the vessels”); it was
the duty of the Hasid to redeem all everyday things from these demonic
influences. In Scholem’s view,
Buber lacked a historical sense and was unaware of the continuous tradition of
Jewish mysticism, which he preferred to regard as a series of unconnected
outbreaks of invaluable mystical insight.
Scholem’s conflict with Buber
** was not merely a matter
of the scholar correcting the romantic. Scholem too was a romantic, although of a
different kind - a kind for whom accurate historical scholarship provided the
necessary fuel. This leads to the
interesting question of Scholem’s own beliefs. Should we think of him merely as the
historian of Jewish mysticism, recording its vicissitudes with academic
detachment, or was he himself more deeply involved? There is certainly no question of
Kabbalism in the traditional sense, which could only rest on a fundamentalist
belief in the Zohar as an ancient work. Scholem never disguised his judgment that
the Kabbalah represents a way of thinking that is now thoroughly outdated. Nevertheless, he held that it should be
studied not merely as a dead historical phenomenon but as an ingredient in our
own intellectual and spiritual lives.
That ingredient is not so much philosophical as
mythical. Whereas normative Judaism
struggles to be anti-mythological, setting a space between God and man, the
Kabbalah (and its antecedent, Merkavah mysticism) seeks a place for myth. In the consequent conflict between myth
and anti-myth lies the vitality of Judaism. Scholem did not regard myth (or
mysticism) as a single universal phenomenon, as Aldous Huxley did in speaking of
the “Perennial Philosophy.” Each
manifestation of myth is specific to a particular culture and is saturated with
the historical experience of that culture. Jewish myth and mysticism, despite many
details borrowed from outside, form a specifically Jewish
phenomenon.
Scholem owed a considerable intellectual debt here to
the ideas of Jung, which he encountered in the circle of Erich Neumann, the
founder of the journal Eranos
- though, characteristically, Scholem was never a full member of this circle,
but participated in its gatherings only as an interested onlooker.*** Jung believed that the individual psyche
contained two poles, rationality and myth, which always sought equilibrium: an
excess of rationality would lead inevitably to a compensating swing to mythical
thinking. This is the pattern that
Scholem applied to the collective Jewish psyche.
Scholem, however, did not invoke particular
psychoanalytic concepts, such as Jung’s archetypes, or Freud’s Oedipus complex,
to explain Jewish mysticism; he considered such an approach reductivist. The phenomena of Jewish mysticism are for
the most part communal rather than individual; to interpret them as the outcome
of psychological conflicts on the individual level would be like trying to
explain art in terms of atomic physics. Like the sociologist Emile Durkheim,
Scholem regarded the world of communal life as more than just the aggregate of
the individual lives of which it is made up.
AND here, on the issue of the individual versus the
community, we touch on the relationship between Scholem the scholar and Scholem
the Zionist. It is in this
relationship, I believe, that the real bond between Scholem and Jewish mysticism
is to be found. For there was
something mystical in Scholem’s philosophy of Zionism.
Scholem thought of the Jewish historical entity as
forming an organism with its own life and principles of development. His quarrel with the Wissenschaft des
Judentums was that it treated Judaism as a corpse to be dissected. The selectivity of Wissenschaft
scholars in choosing for study only those aspects of Judaism which could
bear scrutiny by the respectable German bourgeoisie was, in Scholem’s eyes,
motivated by the desire not so much to “bring Judaism up to date” as to abide by
the pious maxim, de mortuis nil nisi bonum. Moritz Steinschneider, one of the
major luminaries of the Wissenschaft school, actually said openly that
his task was to give the remains of Judaism a decent burial. Scholem reacted against this notion with
all the force of his being.
Not only did his scholarship differ from that of the
Wissenschaft, but his Zionism too differed from the Zionism of those who
repudiated the history of the Diaspora and thought of themselves as making an
entirely new start. He regarded
Zionism as something both new and very old: as a new expression of the ancient
energies of the Jewish national organism, and as further proof of the ability of
that organism to perpetuate itself by fresh responses to the challenges of
history. Zionism itself, moreover,
was an assertion, made by the Jewish national organism, of the same kind that
had been made unequivocally by the Kabbalah when it claimed an eternal, even
divine, status for the Jewish nation (by identifying it with the Sefirah
called Malkhut and with the Shekhinah). Further, Scholem saw the Kabbalah as
the historical precursor of Zionism - in a way that could not be predicated of
normative, non-mystical Judaism. For the Kabbalah had not waited passively
for the exile to end in God’s good time, but had grappled agonizingly with the
fact of exile, had
** See Scholem’s
article, “Martin Buber’s Hasidism,” Commentary, October 1961, followed by
Buber’s article answering Scholem, “Interpreting Hasidism,” September 1963 and
Scholem’s reply, Letters from Readers, February
1964.
*** See David
Biale’s book, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History (1979), and my review of it in Commentary,
November 1979.
44
given it metaphysical status, and had prepared a
technique and a timetable for ending it and breaking through to a new mode of
national being. This, in the
Sabbatian movement, had led to disaster, but the breaking of the orthodox mold
thus achieved had prepared the way for political Zionism.
For Scholem, as we have seen, this was the pattern of
progress: creativeness was attained only through destruction and disaster, in
which, however, the traditional was not repudiated but transformed. It is thus not surprising (at least in
retrospect) that the young Scholem, inspired with Zionist feeling, should have
reached out for a form of Judaism which he instinctively knew to have in it the
seeds of destruction and creation, the movement of life and new birth, despite
its outward appearance of uncouthness and even weirdness. It was by no means the choice of an
academic, looking for a “subject” in which he could make his mark, but rather a
spiritual choice and commitment.
Scholem had a vision of the wholeness of Jewish
experience, and it was this vision, especially as it affected his deep
attachment to Zionism, which acted as the motivation of his stupendous effort of
scholarship. But it is necessary to
distinguish sharply between this vision of wholeness and the relativism which
has often been advocated in other branches of modern Jewish scholarship. Scholem attacked the idea of a
“normative” Judaism in the sense of a dominant strain or direction of thought
against which all other tendencies were deemed insignificant. But he did not seek to negate all unity
or discernible pattern in Jewish history, or to divide off succeeding ages or
generations in such a way as to deny their continuity one with the next. Least of all did he try to explain
succeeding movements solely in terms of the social, economic, or sociological
substrata prevailing at the time. His main aim was to display the
dialectical character of Jewish culture: the presence within it of a
perennial conflict between the forces of conservation and the forces of change,
or between reason and instinct, or between orthodox theology and mythology (all
ways of putting the same thing). In
place of a single tradition, he postulated two traditions, each with its
history and continuity - a tradition of orthodoxy and a tradition of dissent,
or, in Freudian terms, a tradition of the ego and a tradition of the id. These were in continual conflict, but the
conflict itself was another tradition.
IT is only at this point that one may suggest certain
limitations in Scholem’s approach. For him, talmudic Judaism is the domain
of the ego, while mysticism is the domain of the id. But is this quite correct? Talmudic Judaism, after all, has its own
dialectic, of halakhah (law) and aggadah (lore). How does this opposition relate to the
dialectic of Talmudism and Kabbalism? The aggadah is the mythology of the
Talmud, the embodiment of its abstract ideas in stories, picturesque,
impossible, and wild. Only part of
this aggadah, however - indeed, a very small part - is mystical in character.
Whereas the Kabbalah, as it
developed in the Middle Ages, regarded itself as the heir of the aggadah and
made it even more wild by giving it an entirely mystical meaning, the aggadah of
the Talmud is developed in the service of non-mystical ideas. The Talmud’s is a kind of humanistic
mythology that gives a background of dream and instinctual passion to ideas that
are essentially rational: an example is the extraordinary story of the journey
through time made by Moses to attend a lecture given by Rabbi Akiva, which he is
unable to understand. (This little
myth validates the concept of change and progress in the Oral Law.) But besides little humanistic myths,
there are the big myths too, which are based on the Bible: the myth of the
expulsion from Eden and of the Exodus from Egypt.
Such myths, give subliminal support to the values that
are articulated more explicitly in the halakhic portions of talmudic Judaism,
and these, I would argue, are the values of adulthood. Mystical myths, by contrast, are a flight
to infancy, or even as far back as the womb, since they are all concerned to
break down the separations set up by individuality and personal relations. Such a flight is not ruled out by the
Talmud. Indeed, it is conceded as
one of the possibilities of the psyche, albeit one that can lead to knowledge of
so basic a kind that it threatens the whole psychic structure, and must
therefore be kept within strict bounds. But the Talmud’s own characteristic
“mysticism” is of the type which Buber incorrectly attributed to the Hasidim:
the “normal mysticism” (this term is actually a coinage of Max Kadushin) which
achieves closeness to God not by prying into His internal constitution or
seeking incorporation into His mysteries, but by going about His business in the
affairs of everyday life.
The question, then, is whether the Kabbalah should be
regarded not as the unconscious mind of Judaism, but rather as its psychosis.
To ask this question is not to
return to a pre-Scholem attitude of amnesia and repression, by which the whole
tradition is dismissed as if it had never existed. The Kabbalah’s space-flight through the
geography of God is a descent into the abyss of the human mind and a daring
exploration of the origins of creativeness. Nevertheless, to elevate the Kabbalah
into a constitutive pole of the dialectic of Judaism may be to accord it too
high a status. In order to endow it
with this status, Scholem had to exaggerate the indigenousness of the Kabbalah
and to play down (though he did not entirely ignore) the derivation of many of
its elements from outside sources, such as Neoplatonism, Albigensianism, and
indeed Christianity in general. The
origins of Christianity itself, Scholem hints (though he
45
never fully argues), can be understood in the light of
the career of Sabbatai Sevi. The
parallel between Sabbatai Sevi and Jesus, however, is very imperfect (the
parallel between Nathan of Gaza and Paul is much stronger). The similarities can best be explained
not by postulating a parallel evolution out of the dialectic of Judaism but
rather by the direct influence of Christianity on Judaism.
Scholem’s distaste for the idea of a “normative Judaism”
and his reaction against German selectivity can lead to an unwillingness to
acknowledge outside influence, and therefore to a reluctance to distinguish the
authentic from the inauthentic. Even Scholem had to admit to reservations
concerning the superstitiousness and demon-haunted dualism of Polish Hasidism;
here he was almost forced to the point of admitting that some forms of Jewish
existence could be inauthentic. But
to admit this even in one case is to concede a point of principle: that there is
an essence of Judaism in the light of which various Jewish manifestations (for
example, Sabbatai Sevi’s assumption of divine status) can be judged, and if
necessary, condemned. Such an
essence is not “normative” in the institutional sense; we may be led by it to
condemn aspects of orthodox as well as unorthodox Judaism. But acknowledging it does allow us to
retain the possibility of characterizing Judaism as a doctrine or attitude
toward life in general, and hence to recognize the universalist implications
that reside within the organic national entity that is Judaism. For if there is one thing that has always
been characteristic of Judaism, it
has been the refusal to identify God entirely with the Jewish people,
or to sink into any kind of nationalist idolatry.
Scholem’s Nietzschian view of
creativity-through-destructiveness certainly has biblical support, in the
apocalyptic picture of the “day of the Lord” when great catastrophes will be the
prelude to a new dimension of life. Scholem pointed out that this apocalyptic
view of the messianic age has alternated in Judaism with a more gradualist view,
typified by the rationalist Maimonides, that the messianic age will be
continuous with life as we know it and will not necessarily involve cosmic
catastrophe. The controversy is
strangely similar to that between revolutionary Marxists and gradualist
socialists. The apocalyptic view is
associated with a deep consciousness of crisis, while the rationalist view is
associated with optimism about the possibility of human control of the processes
of history.
Scholem may not be correct in identifying the gradualist
view with strict adherence to the status quo, or in crediting catastrophism with
the creative role. It is by no
means clear that the talmudic vision of ordered, peaceful progress is less
potent for change than the crisis theology of the Kabbalah - even though, in
times of actual crisis, the Kabbalah does seem more relevant. We may well take a view typical of
talmudic exegesis - that the catastrophic picture of the messianic age is what
will happen if humanity deserves no better, while the rationalist picture is
what could happen in the admittedly unlikely event that humanity achieves
control of its destiny.
For after all, the catastrophic view of the Last Days,
associated as it is with the idea of a radical change in the human soul, is in
effect a cry of despair over human nature as it is, a prediction, or hope, that
God will eventually admit the failure of His human experiment and substitute
something more viable. This is a
view into which Judaism has often lapsed. But its more durable, and characteristic,
view, as projected in the basic myth of the Exodus, is not so deeply
pessimistic. Scholem himself, in
his political standpoints within the Zionist movement, always stood for control,
reason, and optimism, and not for the vertigo of fanatical, magical messianism.
Though he did not assign to
rationalism the chief creative role in Jewish history, his intellectual practice
was that of a rationalist Jew.
THESE reservations, however, cannot affect Scholem’s
magnificent achievement of historical reconstruction. After his work, we can no longer think of
the history of Judaism as one of outer tribulations but inner calm. The Jewish psyche has been swept by
storms of conflict and passion that have brought it almost to the breaking
point, while at the same time acquainting it with the heights of human
experience. The healing processes
of sanity have intervened not only to redirect but also to conceal. Scholem has told the truth fearlessly,
and has thus helped us toward a kind of sanity that incorporates within itself
the insights made possible only through an understanding of
madness.
46